Cruel Doubt

by Joe McGinniss

  Bonnie still wasn’t sure whether she’d seen one, or maybe two intruders in her room, but she was sure that the attacker was “not my son.”

  She emphasized this: “not—my—son.”

  Angela had been asleep down the hall, and her son had been asleep in his dorm in Raleigh.

  She mentioned regaining consciousness in the hospital and seeing Chris—who she again referred to not by name but as “my son”—standing at her bedside, holding her hand and crying.

  Then she described her injuries again. She talked of frontal blows, the knife wound in her chest, losing two pints of blood. She said she’d had “memory deficits” and would find herself lapsing into “daydreamlike states.”

  As the session drew to a close, she started talking about the polygraph. How demeaning the experience had been. How, three days later, she’d suffered an attack of shingles around her eye. Even though Bonnie had passed with the highest score possible, Dr. Spaulding noted, “She was very upset about the polygraph.”

  * * *

  On August 1, six weeks after his arrest, having read many science fiction books and having smoked innumerable cigarettes, Chris Pritchard was released from the Beaufort County jail on bond of $300,000, posted by his mother.

  At his hearing, District Attorney Norton, a stocky man with a prominent mustache and a painfully slow way of talking, acknowledged for the first time that the prosecution would not contend that Chris had taken part in the murder, or even that he’d been present at the scene.

  Norton reiterated, however, that the state intended to seek the death penalty for Chris, a comment that led to press speculation that Chris would be tried for murder for hire: that the allegation would be that he’d paid Upchurch and Henderson to kill Lieth, and presumably, Bonnie, too.

  Bonnie met Chris at the county magistrate’s office in mid-afternoon. Outside, the press, such as it was in Beaufort County, had assembled.

  “It was a ridiculous scene,” Bonnie said later. “Cameramen tripping all over each other, sticking microphones under Chris’s face, asking him if he was glad to be out.” Neither Bonnie nor Chris made any statement or answered any questions.

  Instead, as the Washington Daily News reported, “nattily dressed in charcoal gray slacks, a light gray sportcoat, white shirt and purple print tie, [and] arm in arm with his mother . . . Pritchard crossed Market Street, with lawyer James Vosburgh leading the way.”

  That night, Bonnie, Angela, and Chris shared a room at the Holiday Inn. Some might have thought it strange that a young man of Chris’s age would sleep in a bed next to his mother and sister, but neither he, Bonnie, nor Angela saw anything unusual about it. Bonnie, in fact, felt the need for physical closeness, even while she and her children were separated by an emotional gulf.

  “I was still scared,” she said later. “Not only for my own safety, but for theirs. The closer we were, the more comfortable I felt. And even if we weren’t having deep conversations, at some level we were still clinging to each other.”

  The next day, Bonnie was back in court to attend the bond hearing for James Upchurch. Bond for Moog was set at $500,000, and unable to raise it, he was returned to the Beaufort County jail.

  Bonnie had gone to the hearing not because she was concerned about the outcome—Vosburgh had already assured her that there was no way Upchurch could raise the money needed for his release—but because she wanted, for the first time, to see this person who had been accused of murdering her husband and of trying to kill her. She thought she might experience some shock of recognition.

  But there was nothing. If anything, there was a shock of nonrecognition. Upchurch was tall and skinny, with unusually narrow shoulders and a notably long and slender neck.

  She did not see Neal Henderson because he’d already been released at an unpublicized hearing held earlier, in a different county.

  * * *

  The following day, August 3, Bonnie and Chris drove back to Winston-Salem. After only one night at home, Bonnie drove to Ocean Isle Beach, at the southern end of the North Carolina shoreline. This was the beach to which she and Lieth had always gone. She’d rented a three-bedroom condominium for a week. Chris and Vince Hamrick drove down together. A day or two later, Angela and Donna Brady arrived.

  “We just relaxed and went our separate ways,” Bonnie said. “We’d meet occasionally for meals. There was no talk about Chris’s situation. After six weeks in jail, the last thing in the world the poor boy needed was to have everybody harping on his problems. This was a restorative time, a time for rest and rehabilitation.”

  One by one, as the week drew to a close, the others left. Alone, Bonnie walked the beach for miles.

  With Chris free on bond, with Bill Osteen firmly in control, and with as capable an investigator as Tom Brereton on the case, Bonnie thought it was not illogical to hope that better days might truly lie ahead.

  * * *

  Bill Osteen’s law office was on the third floor of the Gate City Savings and Loan building in downtown Greensboro. It had neither the quaint and rustic charm of Jim Vosburgh’s narrow poolroom annex in Little Washington, nor the opulence of Wade Smith’s Raleigh headquarters. Plain and serviceable, it was quite obviously a place where business was conducted without frills or fanfare, by a man who knew his business well.

  While Bonnie, Chris, and Angela were at the beach, Bill Osteen spent a great deal of time in this office, thinking about what to do next. Chris was no longer a potential suspect, he was now an accused. And not too many months down the road, a trial would come. A trial that could result in Chris’s being sentenced to death.

  As uneasy as he was about much of what he already knew about Chris, Bill Osteen was even more troubled by how much he still did not know. “There were some gaps,” Osteen said later. “I thought we had to press harder to get to the complete truth, because I didn’t believe we had been there.”

  Among defense attorneys—even defense attorneys whose abilities and ethics are beyond question, as in the case of Bill Osteen—there is debate over how hard a lawyer must press his client in an effort to obtain the full truth before trial.

  Some argue that while an ethical lawyer cannot let a client take the stand and give sworn testimony that the lawyer knows to be false, in many instances it is in the client’s best interest for his lawyer not to be overinformed. In the gray area between certain knowledge and reasonable doubt much strategic maneuvering of the sort necessary to best serve the client can take place. Surely, the one thing a criminal defense lawyer does not want to do is come right out and ask a client whether he’s guilty, let alone try to make him confess.

  Advocates of this approach contend that it is the job of plenty of people on the other side of the aisle—with the full resources of the State at their disposal—to try to demonstrate a client’s guilt. And that, no matter what his personal view of the evidence—or his personal feelings about the client—the defense attorney has a clear and compelling obligation not to do the prosecutor’s job.

  Bill Osteen was not a member of this school. God, family, justice, and truth: these were the cornerstones of Osteen’s life. The son of a federal probation officer, younger brother of a West Point graduate who rose to the rank of major general, himself attracted to FBI service, then later, for five years, the chief federal prosecutor for all central North Carolina, Bill Osteen was, by temperament, training, and religious belief, more comfortable with black and white than shades of gray.

  Speaking of himself and his colleagues in the firm of Osteen & Adams, he said, “We would never, ever take a case in which we did not try to get at the truth ahead of time. We would never, ever just turn our backs on an area because we didn’t want to know the answers. We just don’t operate that way. If we’re going to represent somebody, we’re going to want to know the truth.”

  Not only did Osteen see this as the moral approach to the practice of l
aw, he’d come to believe, after years of work as both prosecutor and defense attorney, that it also carried with it practical advantages.

  Regarding Chris, he said, “We were going to have to make a decision whether to recommend that he go on the stand. In order to make that decision, we had to know what the answers were going to be. And we have a feeling that there is no U.S. attorney we know of, and no state prosecutor, who can ask tougher preparing questions than our office does, in order to get people where they ought to be so they can protect themselves in questionable areas; so that they have answers that are not only truthful, but sound reasonable when they come out. It’s often the case that you can give a truthful answer, but the doggone thing sounds so preposterous. We don’t want to be caught short, and we don’t want our client caught short.

  “So we really do grill our clients as if one of us is the prosecutor. All of it is geared toward, ‘When you get through answering our questions, you need have no fear that any prosecutor is going to trap you.’ We do that every time we have a case. And in Chris’s case, there were some glaring weaknesses.

  “For that reason, we wanted to make sure Chris had answers. Sometimes, you have to push hard on somebody to get the right thing done. We felt like, if we could break through and get to the truth, it could help Chris.”

  And also, perhaps, help his mother. For this was the other, less typical, element involved in Bill Osteen’s representation of Chris. He was the client, but she was his mother, she was paying the bills, someone had already tried to kill her once, and Osteen felt—as had Bonnie’s brother months before—a moral duty in regard to her personal safety.

  “There was,” he said later, “a side to this that was gnawing at us from the standpoint of, ‘Here’s Chris, with his mother over there, and we’ve got to make sure we’re not protecting somebody who should not be protected.’ So we really did give him a good going over.”

  To make sure it was good, Osteen brought Tom Brereton in to handle much of the questioning. It was, as Osteen said later that day to Bill Junior, “time to shake the tree and see what falls out of the branches.”

  The danger, of course, is that if too much falls out, it can make a big mess on the ground.

  * * *

  The session began at nine-thirty Monday morning, August 14, the day after Bonnie got back from the beach.

  “We began,” Osteen said, “thinking Chris was going to be able to give us truthful answers; answers that really did make sense. But as we got into it, things didn’t make quite as much sense. There began to be more questions in my mind. So, then, we sort of zeroed in.”

  But it was Tom Brereton’s recollection that the intent from the start had been not merely to shake the tree, but to uproot it.

  “Bill had told me to go at him,” Brereton said later. “So I came in that morning fully intending to break him. My intention was to get him to confess. From the first day I saw him in jail, I knew I could take him up or down attitudinally. His character was no stronger than a piece of paper. Once he realized he wasn’t floating above it all, in total control, there was nothing to the real Chris Pritchard. Maybe Dimson the Wanderer could tell an undetectable lie, but Chris Pritchard wasn’t going to be able to bullshit me.”

  * * *

  Osteen began the meeting in his customary smooth and polished fashion.

  “Chris,” he said, “we have tried our best to look at all the things you’ve told us and find a way to accept them. But frankly, we’re having a hard time. Now, we’re going to go through these things in a methodical and orderly fashion, and this time, you’re going to tell us the truth.”

  Then Osteen explained that a previously scheduled court appearance would require his occasional absence from the interview, but that his son and Tom Brereton were well prepared to continue in his absence.

  Osteen started by asking about the map. Chris said the only map he’d ever drawn was the one the SBI had asked him to back in March.

  “Yeah,” Brereton said, “and you printed the word LAWSON on that map.”

  “So what?” Chris responded.

  “I’ll tell you so what,” Brereton said, leaning forward. “Expert analysis of that printing shows it’s exactly the same as the printing on the first map you drew. The one you gave to Upchurch and Henderson so they could go down to your house and kill your parents.”

  “I never drew them any map.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Chris,” Osteen said, speaking softly, “the printing on that map they found at the fire certainly looks like the printing you did in March.”

  “I can’t help what it looks like. I didn’t draw any map for Henderson or Upchurch.”

  “Maybe you drew a map for somebody else,” Osteen suggested.

  Chris paused, as if in thought. “Well,” he said, “you know, I could have drawn a map, maybe—I mean, I don’t remember this, but I suppose it’s possible—for one of our D and D games. You know, mapping out a scenario. Or I could have drawn one for a friend of mine. I had this one friend, I remember, his name was Brian. He wanted to come down to Washington but he didn’t know where we lived. You know, maybe I could have drawn a map for him.”

  “And did you ever talk, to your friend Brian, or to anyone else, about the possibility of your parents being killed?” Osteen asked.

  “No. No, never.”

  “I don’t mean seriously,” Osteen said. “I mean, just maybe as a joke.”

  “No, no, I never would even joke about something like that. You know, that would be a really sick joke.”

  Except for the fact that he hadn’t bothered to shave, Chris was so small and skinny, and was wearing such little kid’s clothes, that he looked as if he should have been at day camp, not in Bill Osteen’s conference room with Tom Brereton glaring at him, separated from him only by the width of the conference table.

  “Well, you know,” he said, “Upchurch made a couple of jokes about that. Really sick jokes. But I just ignored him. I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”

  “But you talked about your parents having money,” Osteen said.

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Brereton interrupted, “don’t deny that. Ten people have already told me that you did.”

  “Oh, no, no. Look, I didn’t even know about that. This whole thing about the inheritance. I didn’t even know there was an inheritance. Nobody ever told me about that.”

  “Bullshit!” Brereton said. “Your own mother has told me, and she’s told Mr. Osteen here the same thing—that she explained very carefully to you that there was quite a large inheritance, and that a trust fund had been established, and that you and your sister would come into the money when the younger of you turned thirty-five.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about that. I only heard about the inheritance after all this had happened.”

  “Well, Chris,” Osteen said, preparing to leave for the courthouse, “if you stick to that statement, you put me in the position of having to choose between you and your mother in regard to who’s telling the truth. And I’ll tell you frankly, for me that’s not a hard choice.”

  Once Osteen was out of the room, Brereton moved into a higher gear.

  “Henderson says he drove your car. That’s in his statement to the police. Why would he say that if it wasn’t true?”

  “Beats me,” Chris said.

  “That’s not good enough,” Brereton said.

  “Look, I don’t know why Henderson said that, all right?”

  “He said it because it happens to be true,” Brereton said.

  Chris sat silently, shaking his head.

  “No other answer?” Brereton said.

  Chris shook his head.

  Brereton showed him pictur
es of the bat and knife. He denied ever having seen either before.

  “You ever take Henderson to your house?” Brereton asked.

  “No, never.

  “How about Upchurch?”

  “Nope. Well, not to my house. There was once, back in June, we were on our way to the beach, just decided to drive down there one night, and on the way back we stopped in Washington. We didn’t stay at my house, though. We drove by, I showed him where it was, but we didn’t stop.”

  “So now you’re admitting that Upchurch saw your house before?”

  “Well, yeah, but I mean, so what? It was the middle of the night.”

  “It was the middle of the night when Lieth was killed, too.”

  Chris said nothing.

  “And Upchurch, who’s been by your house, has a map with your printing on it, showing him just where the house is, and the whole time he’s gone your car is gone, too.”

  “I never said my car was gone.”

  “You don’t have to. You gotta understand, Chris, I’ve been in this business more than twenty years. I’ve been bullshitted by a lot better bullshitters than you.

  “This isn’t bullshit,” Chris said. But he was beginning to look a little shakier. “It’s just that my memory—look, I was taking a lot of drugs. There’s some things I sometimes can’t remember.”

  “Like knowing about the inheritance?” Brereton said.

  “Well . . . well, yeah, actually, that is a good example. I think I do remember something about that now. I think one time I might have said something to Vince, my roommate, about my grandparents leaving Lieth a lot of money. But I swear to God, he’s the only person I ever told.”

  * * *

  By late morning, Osteen had returned from the courthouse. He continued the questioning about the money. “Chris,” he said, “how could you have told your roommate about the inheritance if your mother didn’t tell you until after the fact?”